EyeBuyDirect Versus Zenni

 

Online eyeglasses are so cheap that you'll buy several pairs - defeating the cost-savings.

It has been about three years since we ditched the optician in favor of online glasses.  And for the most part, it has been a positive experience.  A friend of ours turned us on to eyebuydirect and we bought two pairs each on there.  One pair broke, but they did replace it under warranty

We've broken three pairs of Eyebuydirect glasses so far.  The pair above broke and I was heartbroken.  I had bought two pairs - one regular glass and one self-tinting.  I sat on one pair and the frame broke.  Duh!   I wanted to just get another pair, but they stopped making the frame.  So I was out of luck.

The second pair, I wrote about before - Mark's pair.  He tried to adjust them and they snapped.  They replaced that under warranty.  So far, so good.

The last pair was a clear (lightly tinted blue) frame that gets lots of compliments. And by the way, this is where Eyebuydirect and Zenni beat the mall stores and Walmart.  Brick-and-mortar stores carry what is popular - bland and inoffensive frames in "regular" sizes.  These are boring and too small for anyone with a large, melon-shaped head like mine.  So you see people with big heads wearing these tiny, tiny glasses and it looks uncomfortable and is.  Online sellers can carry sizes and also colors which are fun.

Anyway, I rolled over in bed on this pair and the hinges broke.  I went online and the frames were only like $30 so I ordered a new pair with plain (flat) glass.  Once they arrived, I popped out the lenses from the old glasses and put them in the new frames.  Problem solved.

After buying some glasses from Eyebuydirect, another friend recommended Zenni.  I went online and ordered the biggest pair of glasses they had - a real Clark Kent frame that fit my head but felt heavy.  I've worn them occasionally, but they are not my favorites.

I noted before that these online glasses seem to last a year or two.  Maybe regular glasses are the same way. Anyway, we went back to Zenni and I ordered a new pair, in bright blue plastic, which gets a lot of compliments at parties and whatnot.  Eyebuydirect plays the usual games with prices, offering "sales" on glasses (I got a pair of aviator sunglasses, single prescription, for $30 on sale, I call them my "Bidens.") and it is a bit tiresome.  "Buy one get two free!  80% off on glasses!"  But the fine print shows that the sale is on the frames only, which can be as little as $9.  50% off $9 ain't much.  When you add in the lenses - particularly transition bifocals - the $9 glasses cost over $100.

Zenni does the same sort of marketing, but also has "Zenni points" or some such, so if you buy a bunch of glasses you get a discount or even a free pair.  Zenni also lets you put two people on the same account, so those points accumulate together.  You know how I feel about this sort of crap (just offer lower prices!) but if that is how they set up the game, you have to at least play at it and get the free thing when it is offered.

Pricewise, Zennii is about on par with Eyebuydirect, perhaps slightly cheaper.  Since they don't offer identical products, it is hard to compare apples-to-apples.  But it seems that a typical pair of glasses for me, at Eyebuy or Zenni, is about a hundred bucks a pair - $110 for Eyebuy, $90 for Zenni.  So I think Zenni wins the price wars - by a little bit.

When I broke my most recent pair of Eyebuydirect glasses, I took some time to study them and compare them to my (nearly) indentical Zenni glasses.  It seems that the Zenni glasses have more robust hinges on them.  That being said, if you sit on either pair, odds are, they are going to break.  The good news is, unlike the old days when glasses were hundreds of dollars and you put them back together with tape, online glasses are cheap enough you can just get a new pair. And if the exact same frame is available, you can order just the frame (with the plain $6 lenses) and do a lens swap.

One neat thing about Zenni - they offered to engrave my phone number inside the temple for free.  Kind of a neat feature.  You can also use "points" to have other customizations done as well.

There are pros and cons, but the pros outweigh the cons.  Online glasses - from either company - are cheaper and have more styles and sizes available that the local discount shop at the mall.   The downside, from what I can see, is that since they are so cheap, it is tempting to order more.  It is what I call the Costco effect - you buy in bulk, so you consume in bulk.  Why not, everything is so cheap!  And so it goes with online glasses.

I am set for glasses for some time now.  I may order a new pair next year if these get scratched or I sit on them (again).  And I may visit Zenni first and use up those points or whatever.  But when it comes down to it, I likely will visit both sites and compare styles and costs (and end up buying a pair from both sites, as I did last time!).

That is one nice thing - not worrying about glasses.  Losing your glasses back in the day was like losing a smart phone.  The cost about the same (inflation adjusted) and it was a PITA to replace them.  With low-cost glasses today, you can afford to have an extra pair.  So when I rolled over on my Eyebuydirect pair, I just sighed and put on my Zennis - and went online and ordered a replacement pair.

Stingy Sign Trick

 

Political signs are annoying.  But they can be recycled for other uses!

I mentioned before that during one of the last elections, the politicians put up these signs along the road near our election polling station.  After the election, they took them down, or at least most of them took them down.  Some candidates (who lost) didn't bother, so I did them the favor of removing their signs for them - and recycling them.  The same was true for a local "Mosquito Control" service which peppered the island with their signs on public property - in a State Park no less!  I liberated them.

We were having a garage sale, and I painted over their political and commercial messages with house paint and then used the signboard (which is a corrugated plastic with wire stakes (the "H" stake) for my garage sale signage.  They are sturdy signs and waterproof, too!

Mark had the idea of painting them with chalkboard paint so they could be written on for different uses.

After paying $35 to have a sign made at a sign shop, I can see where free is a lot more attractive option!

Not only that, but even the stakes (the H-stake) comes in handy when you have signs of your own and the stakes wear out over time.

So all you candidates out there - watch out!  Because the day after election day, I'm grabbing any unattended signage you leave laying about!

Why Your Doctor Doesn't Stick His Finger Up Your Bum Anymore

Blood tests have replaced traditional medicine for a large part.

When we moved to Georgia, we had a great doctor who was old school - because 15 years ago, medicine was old school.  A lot has changed since then - in a short period of time.  Not long ago, a medical "exam" was just that.  You went into a doctor's office and disrobed - entirely - and then put on this paper gown that covered only your front (just barely) and laid on an "examination" table, with some sort of weird paper on it.   A nurse would take your temperature, weight, and blood pressure. 

The doctor would push and prod and probe, and look in your ears and your mouth ("say Ahhhh!") and even up your nose.  The doctor would listen at your heart and lungs and check your cartoid artery for blockage. Then you would be asked to turn over and whoo-hoo! you got a finger up your butt for the old prostate exam.   It was very in-person and personal and represented medicine, to me, for the first 50 years of my life - and was what medicine was like 50 years before that.

But life started to change, and even our old doctor started recommending a bank of blood test for both of us, even if we were generally in good health.  When our doctor died unexpectedly, our new doctors seem less interested in prodding and probing, and more interested in running blood tests.  One "doc in a box" we went to, ordered a blood test and then proceeded to read the results and what they meant, right from the report created by the blood laboratory (I know this, as I read along with him).

The pandemic accelerated the trend.  "Telemedicine" became a thing, and maybe we started to realize all this prodding and probing wasn't necessary - and that contact with others is more dangerous than not.  Another friend passed away the other day (typical of Old People Island).  He was a very strong man, but had an embolism.  He survived that, but didn't survive the hospital, getting one infection after another until it finally killed him.  Death by nurses and doctors who don't wash their hands.  It happens, a lot, and often Doctors are the worst offenders.

Blood tests have gotten better - and there are more of them as well.  Instead of a finger-up-your-butt, they order a "PSA" test, which tells whether you have prostate cancer or not, and if it indicates a high level, well, there ain't much you can do about it anyway - unless you have a young doctor who wants a new Porsche and sees you as a pile of billable hours.  "We can remove your prostate" he says, "but then you'll be incontinent for the rest of your life!"  So you say, "What's in it for me?" and he replies, "Nothing, but I get a new Porsche!"

Yes, medicine works that way - and even "good" doctors (and lawyers - I've seen it!) will recommend treatments that generate a lot of billables, and not even consciously realize they are doing it.  It is human nature that if you are on a quota, and have bills to pay, you work to the quota.  Act shocked.

Whether this new no-touch medicine is a good thing or not, I don't know.  Because the other side of the equation is the pharmaceutical industry.  You go to a doctor, they order a blood test, and if anything is out of wack, they prescribe a pill.  So my purine levels were high (gout) and they prescribe a pill (alopurinol) and when I go back next year, the levels are fine - but we keep testing for the rest of our lives.

Mark went through a similar thing with slightly high blood pressure.  As I noted before, his Mother died of a heart attack and his brother has chronic high blood pressure.  They measure this and put him on a pill and within a week, his BP is down to normal (and he has more energy than ever, it seems!).  It is not like we even see the doctor for blood pressure testing - there are machines at the pharmacy and we even have a home sphygmomonometer device.  Mark even has a watch that measures blood pressure, while other friends have them that measure EKG (as well as heart rate, etc.).  All this data can be uploaded to the doctor's "portal" and you need not even see the Doctor for a diagnosis!

Even blood testing is farmed out to a testing center, and a new career of plebotamist - a person who takes blood samples.  This skill has been around a long time, of course, but in the past, it was part of a nurse's routine duties, not that of a specialist who does nothing else.

So today, it seems there is less touchy-feely and more measuring and testing - and prescribing - in terms of General Practice of medicine.  Or, at least that is how it feels from this patient's point of view.  In many cases, a "checkup" means only going to get blood drawn and then talking on the phone (or informally in the office, with your clothes on) without so much as a handshake.

There are, of course, exceptions.  My dermatologist has two assistants who freeze off chunks of weird skin or pick at odd looking things ("I love to pick" one says, as she pops a zit on my leg).  But I don't think I've even met the Doctor himself.  Mark has, when he had a chunk of his ear removed (it was cancer, but a benign type).

And of course, my proctologist is very "hands on" and while he doesn't shove his finger up your butt, he's got something else a lot more up close and personal.  Fortunately, I shouldn't need that exam again in my lifetime.

So what's the point?  Well, I think two things.  First, this is one of these deals where everything has changed in a matter of a few years and we don't notice it because the change is fairly gradual.  The practice of medicine has fundamentally changed from a traditional "hands on" approach, where the Doctor prodded and pokes and talked to his patients to a modern technique of measuring parameters and then prescribing medicine.  We seem to let this happen without thinking about it too much.

Second, "hands on" medicine might have some advantages, still.  When you talk to a patient, you might get some tidbit of information that might indicate something is wrong - something you can't measure with a blood test.  And tests can be wrong on occasion.   The test-and-pill approach can be dangerous as well - I recounted before how we had a number of "pill mills" locally that prescribed pain meds for "sports injuries" (as rural Georgians are indeed so fond of playing watching sports).

It turned out the best thing for back pain wasn't a pill, but massage, some heat, maybe some cold, and rest and regular (but not too strenuous) exercise.  It worries me that we are going down this road of treating patients like cars - plug in the diagnostic connector, let the computer figure out what is wrong, and replace whatever part is mentioned in the error codes.

I know this is a bad idea with cars - an "Oxygen sensor adaptation limit reached" error doesn't mean your car needs a new oxygen sensor, but that you have a leak in the intake bellows downstream of the mass air flow sensor (a $10 fix).  But many a mechanic will rip out perfectly good oxygen sensors and still not fix the problem.  Could a doctor do the same thing?

That's my worry - that medicine will turn into a "plug and play" type of practice - and already is.  So many times now, you don't even talk to a doctor, but to a nurse practitioner or other type of medical assistant.  And the routine is the same - blood test and then put you on (or adjust your) "meds."

Was the practice of medicine always like this?  Not ten years ago, I think.  Maybe this is a good thing - and advancement.  Maybe not.  All I can say is, it was a sea change and no one seemed to notice it happening.

Preventative Maintenance Versus Run To Failure

Conrad Waddington was on to something - up to a point.

When we had our small fleet of BMWs (four, no less) I frequented many discussion groups related to those cars.  And like clockwork, I would see two kinds of postings, which I later realized were shills for parts sellers.  The first were along the lines of, "I just bought a four-door 318i, automatic, four cylinder, what should I upgrade first?"

Of course, the correct answer would be, "nothing, it is the lamest BMW they sell, and no amount of supercharging or nitrous is going to make it a race car.  Just drive it and save up for that M3 you always wanted!"   But that was not the answer you would see - there would be postings exhorting these kids (and they were just grown-up kids) to plunk down a couple of grand on a supercharging or turbocharging "kit" of dubious quality, that would shorten engine life and still make less horsepower than the smallest six cylinder engine available.  Not only that, they would be throwing a couple of grand at a car worth... a couple of grand at best.

But you can't blame the parts sellers for shilling on discussion groups - that's how they sell this half-assed deer-whistle shit (strut tower braces?  Give me a break!).  They rely on online peer pressure to sell it.  And they provide this with additional shill accounts which promote these schemes and shout down any dissenters.

That was back in the day before social media.  Social media makes it far worse, as postings can be "upvoted" and "downvoted" and as a result, what appears to be popular can be readily manufactured using bots.  Or, often people are just idiots and the most inane comments (and poor puns) are voted to the top, while real quality information disappears into oblivion.

OK, you say, I'm not a boy-racer who is going to empty his wallet on a loud exhaust system or some half-assed suspension lowering kit.  They've got a scheme for you as well.  If you go on these discussion groups, they will exhort you to replace parts on your car because they are "notorious" for failing and will leave you stranded somewhere on a dark and lonely night, or cause the engine to overheat and warp the heads or worse.  You'd better replace that water pump, buddy, they're a time bomb waiting to go off!

Maybe.  Maybe not.  You do read horror stories about plastic cap radiators cracking (or expansion tanks) or water pumps leaking (but not exploding so much).  The real problem is when people keep driving the car as it overheats, taking a small problem and turning it into a huge one.   It is similar to the problems BMW had with its GM-made transmissions (from France, no less, what could possibly go wrong?).  With no dipstick, you could not check the fluid level, so they would leak, over time, and then run low on fluid and people would keep driving them, even as the transmission check light comes on, until the car skids to a halt as the planetary gears shatter into a mess of broken teeth.

So, do you perform preventative maintenance to avoid these sort of problems?  Or do you run the vehicle until the part in question fails, and then fix it?

The problem is not as easy as it first appears.  Conrad Waddington discovered, during World War II, that every time a B-24 was taken out of service for preventative maintenance, it would again be out of service shortly thereafter, for corrective maintenance, as the mechanic stripped out a spark plug or forgot to replace a part he removed or whatever.  Every time you turn a wrench on a car, you wear on the parts of the car.   You can only take something apart so many times before you end up having to replace it.

So Waddington extended the service intervals on these planes (used for coastal patrols, looking for submarines) and a funny thing happened - reliability increased.  Now, I suppose, on a four-engine bomber, if you lose an engine, you can fly back to base and land safely.  But there are other systems which are more critical - if they fail, no one flies back, as Alaska Air discovered when they skipped maintenance of the jack-screw (acme nut) on the tailplane of their MD-80's.

But other times, "leave well enough alone" is often a better approach.  In the BMW world, these online parts sellers would often exhort readers to change spark plugs to a whoop-de-do brand (Bosch platinum, for example) or to flush coolant.  In the old days of cast-iron engines and Prestone antifreeze, this was routine maintenance.  Today, many manufacturers recommend changing these only every 100,000 miles or so.  High-energy ignition and fuel injection mean spark plugs no longer foul so easily.  And modern chemistry and sealed cooling systems mean that antifreeze can last a decade.

What's worse is that if you apply "old school" thought to a modern car, it can backfire.  Those fancy high-performance plugs can be too cold and cause misfire - often mystifying the user, who assumed they would provide better performance.  What's worse, is that with aluminum cylinder heads, it is pretty easy to snap off a spark plug, trying to remove it, which may mean having to remove the cylinder head to tap out the hole (the old-school helicoil technique isn't as popular with aluminum engines).  Sometimes it is best to leave well enough alone.

Similarly, flushing coolant was once seen as a way of preventing corrosion.  But with today's engines - some with iron blocks and aluminum heads, you have to use a specific type of coolant with distilled water and sometimes a water wetter compound as well (yes, it makes water wetter, go figure) or you may end up creating galvanic corrosion, or cavitation issues (in diesels in particular).  Worse yet, you can warp the head if you don't bleed the air from the system, as many cars have the radiator lower than the top of the engine, which means an air pocket can form in the cylinder head when flushing the system.  This could cause engine failure.

So you see how this works - you try to be proactive with maintenance and end up causing disaster.

The problem for me, being a technician and engineer and tinkerer (and apparently Asperger's as well) is that I see something that is wearing out and I think, "I need to fix that!" - it is like a compulsion with me.  But if I start taking something apart, I realize that I have a greater chance of breaking it than fixing it, and maybe it is best to leave well enough alone.  Maybe the device in question is failing - but then again, it may provide a service life beyond that for which I will need it.  What's more, while I could fix the portion that is failing, there may be other parts which are also near the end of their design life, which means it "ain't worth fixing."

Just run to failure and then discard (or overhaul at that point).

Of course, there are safety (critical) items that you shouldn't "run to failure" if you can avoid it.  For example, tires on your car are a safety critical item.  You run them bald, you will get into trouble at the first sign of rain.  Even before then, you will likely get stuck somewhere.  You can literally see when they need to be replaced and are a wear item.  Ditto for brakes.  Yet people do wait until the pads are metal-on-metal or get into a wreck, rather than do a brake job.

You can tell when a car battery is reaching the end of its life (often by just how old it is).  Yet people will inconvenience themselves with jump-starting, time and time again, rather than plunking down a hundred bucks on a new battery.

So how do you tell what does need to be serviced and what doesn't?  Your owner's manual and your local mechanic might help.  Believe it or not, the local dealers have told me not to worry about changing transmission fluids and coolants for extended periods - even though they would make money by doing so.  The owner's manuals recommend lengthy periods between replacements, which, coming from the 1960's, seem startling.  When I grew up, the "spring tuneup" meant new plugs, points, and condensor - the latter two items not even existing on cars today.  And in my Dad's era, every fall you replaced your antifreeze.  To not do so was madness!

But times have changed, and "leave well enough alone" often makes more sense than "a stitch in time."

Besides, it defeats the whole advantage of modern cars, to over-service them.  One nice thing about cars today compared to years gone by is that they do last much longer and need much less maintenance, which is why your local "garage" is now a convenience store.  There is no profit in having a "mechanic on duty" as in the old days.

This applies to other kinds of equipment in your life as well.  If it ain't broke, don't "fix" it as we used to say in the lab.   You could really open up a can of worms trying to make perfect something that is perfectly adequate.

This is not to say you should abuse the equipment in your life, only to take care of it, treat it gently, and don't over-service it.

I tend to look for trouble - and often find it.  A friend of mine is a retired MD-11 pilot and I remarked that I would have made a horrible flight engineer back in the days when they had them.  I would have said things like, "Did you hear that?  That didn't sound right!  Sounds like a thrust bearing going bad on #2...."   And my friend said, "you're right - I would never fly with you!"  Pilots are a special breed, who concentrate on flying the plane and not worrying whether the equipment works or not.  "Kick the tires and light the fires" they say, and often they fling their craft all over the sky, in much the same way a teenager drives his Mother's car.

I think there is some sort of happy medium, though.  Air crash reports are rife with examples of pilots trying to "fix the plane" rather then just landing the damn thing at the first sign of trouble.  On the other hand are pilots who fail to understand how systems work, and rely on everything working perfectly and thus unable to respond when an instrument goes wrong.

I am trying, as I get older, to worry less about equipment, and one sure way to do this is to own less equipment.  Having stuff and things is fun and all, but they do require work to maintain and eventually - someday - they have to be scrapped or replaced.

Just as we ourselves will be, someday!

The Big Nothingburger?

The Trump indictment seems almost like an April Fool's joke!

Everyone - and by "everyone" I mean political junkies - is having an orgasm over this Trump indictment, as if it was finally the "smoking gun" promised for oh-so-many-years that will put Trump in jail for good!

Maybe, but I doubt it.  And quite frankly, this trivial bullshit will just enable Trump to argue that it is all a political attack and thus deflect more serious charges of sedition, conspiracy, inciting a riot, trying to rig an election, and of course, treason.  After all, if the "Stormy Daniels" indictment is garbage, maybe the other things mean nothing, too!

You would think this was out of Trump's playbook, not the Democrats'.  Trump was famous for distracting people with a tweet just as something damning came out.  And it is a time-honored technique to get people to fixate on trivial things and thus ignore more serious ones.  If the only "crime" Trump is guilty of is sending $130,000 to a porn star, then what's the beef?

That is the argument they will raise, anyway.

So what is the beef?

I mean, is it illegal to give someone $130,000 in return for their silence?   Apparently not, as people do this all the time - paying "hush money" in return for someone signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement to keep them quiet.  So long as what they are keeping quiet about wasn't illegal, it is not against the law to pay someone not to say unflattering things about you or to keep trade secrets or to not disclose company policies or... whatever.

But that is not the "crime" Trump is accused of.  The money was paid to Stormy Daniels by Trump's hapless lawyer, Michael Cohen, who in turn invoices the Trump Organization for his fees as well as the hush money.  This is all later characterized as legal fees on their books and no doubt claimed as a tax deduction.

Aha!  Tax fraud!  It is what caught Al Capone, right?  Well, maybe.  The indictment is sealed for now, so we won't know until it is unsealed.  And shouldn't the Justice Department be handing a tax matter, not the District Attorney for Manhatten?

If they indeed claimed this as a business deduction and it was actually a personal expense of Donald Trump (although, I suppose Trump Org could claim that maintaining his image - which is all the Trump Org is anymore - a trademark licensing company) then they may owe back taxes, which at most might be thirty grand or so.  Not really a rip-roaring crime, as deductions are not as clear-cut in terms of tax fraud as, say, failing to report income.  Even so, Trump paid little or no taxes in previous years, so maybe it would not have even affected his tax bill one dollar.  I don't see tax fraud as the big deal here.

It turns out that keeping fraudulent business records is a crime in New York State - a whopping misdemeanor.  Pay the fine - a few hundred bucks - and move on, right?  I mean, if that's all there is, there isn't much going on here.

But there may be another angle - Campaign Finance Laws.  The argument, as I understand it, goes like this: Paying $130,000 to Stormy Daniels was, in effect, a campaign donation, and since it was unreported, that is a crime, potentially a felony.

Campaign donation?

Yes, the theory goes like this (apparently): By paying off Stormy Daniels, Cohen (or Trump by reimbursing him) was making a campaign contribution, as the money benefited Trump's campaign in he final days (funny thing, though, didn't we all know about Stormy Daniels and other affairs during the campaign?).  Thus, in effect, the "hush money" should have been reported as a campaign contribution. Moral: In the future, pay off your hussies through a Political PAC - they are pretty much free to do what they want to, after Citizen's United.

But whether that argument will work remains to be seen.  Can they prove that there was intent to make an illegal campaign donation?  Or that anyone in the Trump Org even considered it such?  I am not an expert on these matters, but in terms of awful things Trump has done over the years (and it is a long list) it really isn't even in the top 10, much less the top 100.

Are there other "crimes" involved here?  Maybe.  Maybe there is something else that will come out in the next few days - something with more meat in it.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, we are having an investigation of our own.  People in Florida used to laugh at folks in Georgia as being a bunch of right-wing rednecks - and we do have our share of those.  But it is a State that elected not one, but two Democratic Senators on January 7th (something happened the day before, I forget what).  We also have a Governor and Secretary of State, who, when pressured by Trump to "find votes" for him (like 30,000 of them!) they politely declined.   And oddly enough, both were re-elected to office, despite standing up to Trump - which in other States is considered political suicide.

So, so glad we moved away from Florida and settled in Georgia.  Florida is just going batshit crazy!

But I digress.

The point is, there are far more serious crimes that Trump likely committed, like trying to get the Governor of our State to commit vote fraud - and his calls for insurrection and riots, which continue to this day.  You know, some hippie burning the American flag would be tossed in jail for "disturbing the peace" or "inciting a riot" but Trump gets a pass for telling people to "march on the Capitol" and "fight like hell!"

We fail to realize how close we came to losing our country, not long ago.  And no, people whose opinions you don't like winning fair elections isn't "losing our country" by a long shot.

My fear is that this huge (and as Donnie would say, "UGE!") nothingburger will distract people from the real crimes Trump has committed.  Already online and in the news they are offering "live coverage" of the indictment, even though it is sealed and even though nothing is happening - at least until next week.

And then what?  Maybe some video of Trump entering a building and more "analysis" from talking heads and maybe then a plea agreement or possibly a trial next year.  And lord help us if there is a trial in 2024 - it will be the centerpiece of his campaign.  And if this nothingburger turns out to be a nothingburger, well, it might be enough to push Trump back into office.

My Mother always said, "choose your battles wisely!"  I wish the Democrats followed this advice.